LEYLA IŞIK : A JOURNEY TO MY POETRY / Translated by Baki Yiğit

I had no chance to stop time flowing, and was partly experiencing happiness in it while my pains were flapping. You started knocking on my door as the time that has taken me away was affecting me. You were like a lover, like a breath. You were a breeze sweetly blowing in the hours when the sun wrapped us in all its glory. At such moments, you were my hero, and just to spite the sun I used to give my arm to you, and sail into the infinity, swinging. You used to whistle in my ear, constantly saying, ‘Recognize this enthusiasm.’ At first, I didn’t used to understand it. I later combined you with the sun, the sky and the sea with the blue, and an endless journey with love. With its increasingly rising identity my soul was telling me to seek you. On that day I departed for deserts, and on that day I started piercing mountains. Those who were around me did not know what I was seeking. They could not know the place where I was seeking you because they were not there. You who knocked on my door as one unknown in the years of my youth have now would be the known passionate love that I cannot give up. And I have decided to fall in love with you.

You sometimes came to me, hiding among pages but mostly came out of life and held my hand. Your hands were my coolness in summer days, and my warmth in crazy coldnesses. My hands that I have left in your hands would not know anyone else’s hands but yours. I cannot fully define that feeling but I understood that I could not do without it. Was it a state of madness? A word in you would take me to unseen places. In the places I went, the calls of other places saying, ‘Come.’ No, no! My going was not a straw on a stream of water. I was gladly living my every moment, and gladly taking my every step. What kind of love was this? I didn’t even know its name.

Your winking when you said, “My name doesn’t matter.” is still fresh in my memories. Because you knew I would unwittingly find you name. Although you seemed alive and kicking, your developed identity had such an experience. I have believed in this, sometimes running, sometimes limping, and sometimes breathlessly putting my hands upon my waist on the way to God. You would be respectful to those who are loyal to you, and those who take pains with you, and you would always stop at nothing to evince this. You were the reason for the blooming of the suns inside me while getting wet in the craziest rain, and you were also the one who came down to me like a beardless johnny-on-the-spot when I was at a dead-end in a most wretched manner.

I was a lover, a mother and in love with you like no one would know. When you understood this you made up your mind, and extended your hands. You said, ‘My name is poetry.’

It was caressing my hair, saying ‘I am your poetry, don’t love someone else, and don’t have an affair with someone else. Let me be in your night and day. Give me your hand in the places most impossible to get out, I will get you out, I will be your wings at the abysses, did you understand me?’

I decided not to love anyone else, and said, ‘My poetry,’ to it with the greatest love in the world.